Come visit us at our new web site: www.interestingitems.org Leave your thoughts, comments and opinions. We look forward to hearing from you. Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday July 18, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Shuttle 2. Vesta 3. Sanity 4. Syria 5. Light Bulb 6. Threats 7. Groping 1. Shuttle. Atlantis lifted off last Monday on the last scheduled Shuttle flight. It should land sometime this week. I got to see the first launch of Columbia in 1981 and was completely blown away. If you’ve never seen a launch from close up, you probably ought to add it to your bucket list. With the retirement of the shuttle, a couple questions come to mind: What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? In my mind, the single worst thing that shuttle did was to solidify the notion that manned spaceflight is a government monopoly. Think of the US Postal Service with space suits. Over the years, both the NASA bureaucracy and congress came to view manned spaceflight as simply another jobs program to be defended from all comers. Per launch costs were on the order of a billion dollars per flight. And they never went down. After the Challenger and Columbia accidents, both of which were operational failures rather than hardware failures (Challenger should not have launched large solid boosters in extreme cold and someone should have taken a close look at Columbia on the day it was launched to see if it had a hole in its wing), safety overrode every other consideration and was often used as an excuse not to do things that the bureaucracy did not want to do. There is only one way to control costs and increase operability, and that is competition. We never had enough orbiters. We never flew them often enough. And we never developed or purchased Block 2, 3, 4, etc. versions. There was private interest 30 years ago. Klaus Heiss led an investor group that wanted to buy a fifth orbiter and simply give it to NASA. In return, they wanted to schedule all empty cargo bay volume and leftover mass on remaining shuttle flights. They claimed to have $1.5 billion of private money in the bank. The NASA bureaucracy decided this was a threat to the monopoly and slow-rolled the proposal until the money went away. In the mid-1980s, there was a burgeoning movement to fly any number of non-NASA people. This was most famously demonstrated as the Teacher in Space program. There were numerous proposals to salvage expended shuttle external tanks and outfit them in orbit. Nobody ever got the property rights and nothing ever happened. After Challenger, safety concerns allowed the bureaucracy to dig in and guaranteed there would be no competition. We have lost a generation with a government monopoly on manned spaceflight. That monopoly has now been broken, with the new Space companies showing how to build and fly space hardware for one tenth the cost. Competition will bring down costs, increase safety, and ensure that space is permanently open to all Americans. Ed note Alex Gimarc’s BS is Aerospace Engineering; Masters is Space Technology. He spent 20 years heading up the Space Studies Institute (SSI) Space Shuttle External Tank project. He wrote the SSI Report on External Tank Application to President Reagan’s National Space Commission in 1985, which led to direction to NASA to consider their salvage and use. He is a 20-year advocate with the Space Frontier Foundation. Rich Martin 2. Vesta. The Dawn space probe slipped into orbit around the second largest asteroid, Vesta, Friday night. This is the seventh largest body inside the orbit of Jupiter and has never been visited. It is thought to be one of the two remaining building blocks (protoplanets) from the formation of the solar system. Dawn will orbit it for a year and depart this time next year for the largest asteroid (now re-designated as a dwarf planet), Ceres, where it will orbit until it runs out of propellant. This is pretty cool stuff, as both bodies appear to be evolved bodies with a crust, mantle and core. Ceres may have ices. Vesta is thought to be rocky and is not round any more due to billions of years of impacts. You can follow the mission here: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/ 3. Sanity. Energy sanity is returning to Germany. Last week, the German government announced that they would be redirecting its climate change funding to construction of new natural gas and coal fired electric generation plants. They are also moving sharply away from renewable energy (inoperable solar and wind). They are also reconsidering their self-imposed, kneejerk ban on nuclear energy following the Japanese Fukushima tsunami disaster. There is a significant political force of greens in the German government and among the populace. They are not happy with this. Yet when it gets cold outside, you need electricity and the Germans have decided – rationally – that they are not going to get what they need from solar, wind and other renewables. Congratulations on making the right decision for the right reason. Now for the second part: reopening their nuclear program. 4. Syria. The anti-Assad, anti-Baathist revolt in Syria continues to percolate along, with a series of protests late last week that had a reported million people in the streets. Pro-Assad forces (secret police, Hezbollah, and Iranian) were not able to bully their way into shutting down the protests. It appears that Assad may be in the process of losing control. No word about how much push the Israelis are making to help the protesters. Assad did trigger an anti-Israeli attack a week or two ago in an attempt to change the subject. The Israelis did not bite. The Turks are concerned about Syrian refugees trying to escape into Turkey. I expect they are also considering putting Turkish troops into Syria should the government fall. If the Assad regime falls, this is the worst possible news for the Mullahs in Iran, as Syria has been central in the expansion of their influence into Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Fatah among the Palestinians, and a second front in Iraq. What is bad news for Iran is good news for us here in the US and in Israel. Things are getting sufficiently serious that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a couple small noises warning Assad against doing anything mean or nasty to the protesters. Imagine what we could have done if we had a government in office that supported liberty in the Middle East. 5. Light Bulb. Fred Upton’s (R, MI) attempt to suspend House rules and overturn his ban on the incandescent light bulb failed to receive enough votes to pass early last week. The House went to Plan B and passed a repeal via an amendment to a spending bill. It was approved by voice vote and sent to the senate for action. Given that the senate has not done squat all year long, it remains to be seen if the repeal will make it to Obama’s desk for signature. Congratulations to Upton and the House leadership for their action on this. 6. Threats. The party that gave us anti-Republican campaign ads showing Paul Ryan shoving his mother over a cliff in a wheel chair followed it up last week with threats not to send out social security checks if the debt ceiling was not raised. Obama himself started threatening the elderly last week, as he returned to his old community organizer, Alinsky roots, with threats not to send the checks out. The Commander in Chief has become the Hostage Taker in Chief. The best numbers I have come across are that the Treasury takes in about $172 billion / month. They are spending around $310 billion / month. The difference is the deficit. Don’t raise the debt limit and don’t approve any more spending, printing of paper money, or federal borrowing, and the feds have to do an immediate monthly cut of over a billion dollars. There are sufficient funds to cover the debt service, social security and defense spending. This argument is for all the marbles. It is also as easy as it will be for a very long time, for if conservatives don’t win this one, once ObamaCare is fully implemented, the next argument will have a democrat president threatening to close hospitals, deny medical treatment and medicine to those that need it. This is the time to stand up to this bully and do something about federal spending. 7. Groping. The funniest story of the week came out of our continuing fight with the TSA. A 61-year old Colorado woman fired back at a TSA agent in Phoenix last week. She reached out, grabbed her breasts and “inspected” them. She was immediately arrested on sexual assault charges and will be tried on felony sexual assault. I want to be on that jury. More later - - AG "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. 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